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Home , Brittany, Celtic, Celtic nations, Cornish Assembly, Isle of Man Green Party, Truro

Are Cornish politics ?

Bernard Deacon

(A paper presented to ‘The Politics of the Celtic Fringe’ symposium, organised by the Institute of Cornish Studies, Tremough Campus, Penryn, 21st June 2013)

In the first few years of the twentieth century a small band of Cornish revivalists struggled to convince sceptical Celticists in , , and that too was Celtic. If they could return now they would no doubt be surprised and delighted in equal measure to observe Cornwall’s regularly ascribed Celtic status. Participation in pan-Celtic cultural events is accompanied by a cultural pantheon of ‘Celtic’ music, ‘Celtic’ imagery and ‘Celtic’ artefacts. Cornwall is even deemed worthy of inclusion in academic works on Celtic geographies and histories.1 Although the average person on Cornwall’s streets may not be so predisposed to attach a ‘Celtic’ prefix to themselves, Cornwall’s position as one of the of north west would seem secure.

However, if Cornwall’s culture can be re-branded and packaged as Celtic, can its politics be likewise? In order to assess how Celtic they are we must first determine what is meant by Celtic politics. The concept might be approached in three ways. We could seek to describe politics in the Celtic countries. This then begs the question of what qualifies as a Celtic country. Here, I adopt the assumption of most scholars is that it applies to territories where a Celtic language is spoken.2 Or we might adopt a normative view of Celtic politics, taking the existence of pan-Celtic consciousness and connections for granted and signing up to its desirability.3 From within either of these approaches Cornish politics are automatically Celtic and the question posed in this paper’s title becomes redundant. Yet there is a third way. We can also ask how far Celtic politics as a concept is a useful analytical tool for understanding politics in the Celtic territories and the character of their political systems, processes and structures. In practice approaches will combine elements of all three of these approaches. However, my intention here is to ask explicitly how far Cornwall fits into a model of Celtic politics and how far such a model then enables us to understand the actual and potential politics of Cornwall.

Where do we find a model of Celtic politics? One recent attempt to pull together the political characteristics commonly associated with the Celtic countries (in particular Celtic Britain and in practice more narrowly Ireland, Scotland and Wales) has been made by Kurt Jefferson.4 Jefferson posits a wide ranging typology of Celtic politics that includes language and race, territory, political culture, social democracy, economics and religion.5 Leaning towards a descriptive and historicist approach, his model is too broad for the purposes of this brief assessment. Nonetheless, I have selected three elements in order to establish a comparative setting which allows us to evaluate the ‘Celticity’ of Cornwall’s contemporary politics. These are the presence of devolved institutions, an ethno-nationalist or ethno-regionalist identity, and a particular political culture.

Devolved institutions Cornwall falls at the first hurdle as it is the only Celtic country without a devolved institution. The Cornish Constitutional Convention, founded in 2000 to demand a

1 Cornish Assembly, was effectively blown out of the water by the pre-emptive strike of Liberal Democrat and Labour politicians at and Westminster, who commandeered the Cornish level of territory in 2009 for local government. While unitary local government on the old District scale or something similar might have opened up a space for a Cornish Assembly, a shuts it down. The County Council is dead; long live the county!

However, within the devolved institutions of the remaining Celtic countries Jefferson notes other aspects. First, Celtic representative institutions are elected by forms of proportional representation - the single transferable vote in Ireland, additional member systems in Scotland and Wales, and a list system for the Breton regional council. Second, these institutions are, he claims, more female-friendly than the norm. In 2003 the Welsh Assembly became the first democratically elected assembly in the world where 50% of members were women, although this proportion has since slipped back. Third, the party systems of the Celtic countries are multi-party and ‘moderate’, with the exception of .

With no devolved institution comes no PR, although we can compare the presence of female councillors on Cornwall Council with their numbers in the devolved institutions.

Table 1: Women representatives (%)

2005/09 2010/13 Wales 45 40 Scotland 36 36 Cornwall Council 28 23 House of Commons 20 22 Irish Dail 14 16

Cornwall Council does not appear on this basis to be much more female-friendly than the House of Commons. Indeed, the proportion of women declined at the 2013 local elections. Yet we might also note that Irish electors return even fewer women, thus illustrating that on closer examination this model of Celtic politics is not always applicable across all the other Celtic countries either.

Jefferson points out how the majority of the devolved institutions have moderate multi-party systems, involving three or more major parties who share basic assumptions about the legitimacy of democratic structures.6 His exception is Northern Ireland, which he characterises as polarized pluralism. However, with consociationalism at Stormont finally established in 2007 after a five year stand-off, and its relatively successful operation since, it would not be stretching things too far to include Northern Ireland as well within a moderate multi-party system. Jefferson’s description of Westminster as a two-party system might also be challenged. Even the straitjacket of the UK’s antiquated plurality voting system fails to prevent the growing diversity of voting patterns on the ground slowly seeping into the Commons, as the onset of coalition politics in that chamber since 2010 might indicate. Indeed, the European norm would seem to be moderate multi-partism. In this respect Cornwall Council is not atypical. At the 2013 local elections representatives from six separate

2 political parties plus assorted Independents were returned. Moreover, the biggest group (the Lib Dems) can only muster 29% of the available seats.

Yet, while multi-partism is familiar at a local level, Cornish politics at the state level present a contrasting picture. At the 2010 general election the two largest parties in Cornwall won 82.7% of the vote. This was much higher than in the other Celtic countries and even in .

Table 2: Share of the vote for the two largest parties 2010 (%)

share parties Cornwall 82.7 Conservative/Liberal Democrat Brittany (2012) 69.7 Parti Socialiste/Union pour un Movement Populaire England 67.2 Consevative/Labour Wales 62.4 Conservative/Labour Scotland 61.9 Labour/ Ireland (2011) 55.5 Fine Gael/Labour

On this measure and at this level Cornwall is still locked into an older two-party system. Moreover, this is one that looks back not to the twentieth century but to the party system of the nineteenth. At the parliamentary level Cornish politics have apparently not yet managed to transcend the age of Gladstone.

Ethno-national identities In the Celtic model of politics we expect to find a strand of politics that reflects the presence of a national or regional identity. It is based on ideas of and self- determination, the rights of an indigenous ethnicity and the defence of cultural autonomy. Organised political nationalism emerged first in Ireland, followed in the first half of the twentieth century by Brittany, Wales, Scotland and Cornwall in that order. After a bloody struggle that combined the ballot and the bullet, the 26 counties of Ireland achieved independence within the Commonwealth in 1921 and full sovereignty by 1949. Despite short-lived attempts by a minority to win independence, by violent means, notably in Brittany and Wales in the 1970s and ,7 the ethno- nationalist struggle in the other Celtic countries has rejected the Irish model and focused on the democratic path to self-determination. But inevitably, some ethno- nationalist parties are further down that road than others.

3 Table 3: Mean percentage vote of ethno-nationalist parties at state level (%)

MK (% seats SNP UDB contested) 2001 2.1 (60) 14.3 20.1 1.5 (94) (Brittany: 2002) 2005 1.7 (80) 13.2 18.0 2.7 (44) (Brittany: 2007) 2010 1.9 11.3 19.9 2.2 (30) (Brittany: 2012)

It is usual for political scientists rather simplistically to use the vote for ethno- nationalist parties as a measure of the strength of ethno-national identity. On this measure any ethno-national identity in Cornwall is not merely weaker than the Celtic norm but pathetically so. While at the last three parliamentary elections the SNP won the support of around a fifth of Scottish voters and Plaid Cymru over a tenth of Welsh, MK has not been able to convince more than one in fifty of the electorate to vote for it in parliamentary elections. Nonetheless, this proportion is not much inferior to that won by the Union Démocratique Bretonne (UDB) in Brittany, the oldest and most active party of the Breton Emsav. If we exclude the exceptional case of the UDB’s Paul Molac in Ploermel, who in 2012 was given a free run by the Parti Socialiste and Les Verts and scored 26% in the first round, the UDB’s vote when opposing the main French political traditions is similar to MK’s, especially given the smaller proportion of seats it contests.

However, it has been widely observed that ethno-nationalist parties perform much better in regional elections than at state level.8 This is indeed the case in Wales, Scotland and Brittany, as Table 4 indicates. (In Brittany the UDB has been in alliance with the since 2004 in the grouping Europe Ecologie).

Table 4: Mean percentage vote of ethno-nationalist parties at regional elections

MK (% seats Plaid Cymru SNP Europe contested) Ecologie Bretagne 2003/05 12.6 (22) 19.7 20.9 2007/09 17.0 (27) 21.0 31.0 9.7 (Brittany: 2004) 2011/13 24.5 (21) 17.9 44.0 12.1 (Brittany: 2010)

In Cornwall of course we have no regional assembly. But if Cornwall (County) Council elections are assumed to be our regional level equivalent we can see that - using the mean votes per candidate, the same basis as Table 3 - MK also performs considerably better at this level. Indeed, its mean vote is not that dissimilar to Plaid’s. (In fact, Plaid Cymru candidates in the 2012 Welsh local elections scored a mean vote across Wales of 31.6%).9 These results indicate at least a potential support and the solid minority presence of political ethno-nationalism in Cornwall albeit, as in Brittany, at a lower level than in Scotland and Wales and less visible at the state parliament level. This is recognised by some commentators; [MK] ‘is a long way

4 from being the equivalent of the SNP or Plaid Cymru, but it is a serious and committed presence on the Cornish scene with potential for growth’.10

While on this measure of electoral support neither Cornwall nor Brittany unambiguously fit the Celtic model, there are other ways of measuring the strength of a national/regional identity, expressed in cultural rather than political terms. Politically, context is all important. The earlier electoral interventions of the SNP and Plaid Cymru paved the way for them to take advantage of the anti-metropolitan surge of the 1960s. In contrast, MK and the UDB were only tentatively testing the electoral waters in that decade. In the more southern Celtic countries, the Liberals/Liberal Democrats and the Parti Socialiste were quicker to adopt expressions of support for local autonomy. Critically, this siphoned off a proportion of potential support for ethno-nationalist parties before the latter had fully established themselves as credible alternatives. Contingent factors of timing may therefore blur the presence and strength of ethno-regionalist cultural identity.

The most effective way of quantifying a highly contextual and relational concept such as identity is often regarded as the Moreno question. This seeks to elicit the strength of identity within a comparative bi-polar framework, rather than by its simple presence or absence. It does this by asking those surveyed to opt for one of five positions on a continuum of identity attitudes. Table 5 presents some data from the Celtic countries comparing the regional with the state level identities, with the addition in the Cornish case of a Cornish-English comparison derived from the same survey.

Table 5: Identity in Celtic countries Cornish/ More Equally More British/ Welsh/ C/W/S/B C/W/S/B British/ French Scottish/ than and French only (%) Breton British/ British/ than only (%) French (%) French (%) C/W/S/B (%) Wales 20 17 35 22 6 (2003) Scotland 24 40 28 4 4 (1999) Brittany 2 15 57 17 7 (2003) Cornwall 13 15 22 10 40 (2008) Cornish More Equally More English only Cornish Cornish English only than and than English English Cornish Cornwall 17 17 18 9 39 (2008) Source: Anina Carkeek, ‘ revival: attitudes, behaviour and the maintenance of an ethnic identity’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of East Anglia, 2009, p.281; Alastair Cole, Beyond Devolution and Decentralisation: Building

5 regional capacity in Wales and Brittany, University Press, Manchester, 2006, p.18; Lynch, ‘The Scottish National Party: the long road from marginality to blackmail and coalition potential’, in Lieven de et al. (eds), Autonomist Parties in Europe: Identity politics and the revival of the territorial cleavage, Institut de Ciències Polítiques i Socials, Barcelona, 2006, 237

We can again note from this table that there is no single model of Celtic politics. In fact, two contrasting patterns are present. In Scotland, we find strong Scottish identification and very weak identification with the state identity, a pattern interestingly replicated in the Basque country.11 In Brittany however, self- identification resembles a normal curve, with weak Breton only and French only identities contrasting with a strong dual Breton-French identity.12 The Welsh response to the Moreno question is more evenly spread. To some extent, the Cornish data resemble the Welsh, particularly when Cornishness is contrasted with Englishness. However, the stark difference in Cornwall is the low proportion of dual identities and the relatively high numbers expressing no Cornish identity at all and only British or English identities. This reflects the greater demographic changes imposed on Cornwall since the 1960s and the introduction of a large number of residents with no prior connection to the land. Paradoxically however, mass in-migration to Cornwall may also have contributed to a growth of Cornish-only self-identification. Cornwall’s recent social history has therefore produced a more polarised identity structure, perhaps more akin to Northern Ireland than the other Celtic countries.

More evidence that in-migration has triggered a reactive ethnic response in Cornwall can be gleaned from the Census. In 2001, in response to the question on ethnic identity, 6.7% of people in Cornwall went to the trouble of writing in ‘Cornish’. In 2011 in a similar context, even though the tick-box option was refused by the Office for National Statistics, the proportion claiming a Cornish ‘national identity’ in Cornwall almost doubled to 13%. This echoes the results of the annual schools survey in Cornwall, which shows a steady increase in the proportions of schoolchildren choosing to identify themselves as ‘Cornish’, from just 24% in 2006 to 41% in 2011.13 Husk estimates that the 2001 Census result underestimated the level of Cornish self- identification by a factor of four to five, with the ‘real’ level of subjective ethnic identification in Cornwall being between 25 and 30%.14 As the Census figure has doubled since then, does this imply that the ‘real’ proportion of Cornish subjective ethnicity is now nearer to 50 to 60%?

The 2011 Census data also support the long-observed notion of a west-east gradient of Cornishness, with the most ‘Cornish’ districts being in the west and the least next to the . This has sometimes been explained as the result of heavier in- migration in the east.15 But it is more likely to be a longer-term structural result of the spatial weighting of the more obvious symbols of Cornish identity - the Cornish language in the landscape, mining, rugby - towards the west. Moreover, as the following map shows, some wards around the Camel estuary have higher than expected levels of Cornishness, no doubt a reaction against the very high level of second home ownership in that area. The same phenomenon is evident in the Roseland and on the .

While not displayed politically in electoral success at Westminster level, there is evidence therefore for a Cornish ethno-nationalist idenitity. Furthermore, strong

6 evidence is also present to suggest this identity is strengthening and has become more explicit and articulate over recent decades.

Political Culture Post-materialism Having identified the presence of an ethno-nationalist identity, albeit countered to some extent by an English identity reinforced by recent settlement, is there anything suggesting Cornwall shares other aspects of a Celtic political culture? The claim that the Celtic model of politics is post-materialist might rest as much on dominant imagery of being close to nature and more ‘primitive’ than on survey data or voting behaviour.16 That said, temporary alliances between Plaid Cymru and the Party in Wales in the 1980s and the electoral cooperation of the UDB and Les Verts in Brittany since the mid-2000s implies ground shared by ethno-regionalist and green parties. This reflects an environmentalist strand to the generally left of centre policies of ethno-nationalist parties stemming from their electoral emergence and expansion in the late 1960s.

Post-materialist attitudes are however a little more difficult to discern when we turn to the voting behaviour of the Celtic electorates.

7 Table 6: Mean vote for Green parties: 2010/12 (% per candidate or seat contested)

Parliamentary Regional elections, European elections, 2010-12 2010-13 elections 2009 Brittany 5.6 12.1 (EEB) 18.6 Northern Ireland 2.5 3.0 3.3 Scotland 2.0 4.4 7.3 Cornwall 1.9 12.6 7.9 Ireland 1.8 - 1.9 England 1.8 - 8.9 Wales 1.2 3.4 5.6

The Greens consistently do best in Brittany, where their score in the European elections of 2009 was 2.3 percentage points higher than in the rest of the French ‘hexagon’. Within the UK, their results are less consistent. In Parliamentary elections the of Northern Ireland performed best in 2010. In that year, voters in the Celtic countries did not seem any more likely to vote Green than voters in England. However, in elections to the Irish Dail in 2011 were punished for their participation in the government coalition with Fianna Fail, badly discredited by its actions during the financial crisis and subsequent bail-out. The vote of the Irish Green Party had peaked in 2007 at 4.7%, well above the vote ever achieved by them in England. This greater success was probably aided by PR. Reinforcing this point, the Greens, like ethno-nationalist parties, do better in second order elections at regional and European levels. At the European elections of 2009 however, the Greens scored better in England than they did in all the other Celtic countries save Brittany. In Cornwall, comparison is difficult because of the absence of PR at the regional level. However, Green Party performance looks unexceptional, although the party appears to be building an electoral base in the St Ives district.

Social democracy The Celtic peoples are deemed to be more attached to social democracy in contrast to an Anglo-American preference for neo-liberalism. The problem arises in determining the best measure to adopt to assess support for social democracy. As the late Iain Banks said, ‘squeeze practically any Tory, any Blairite, or any Lib Dem of the Orange Book persuasion, and it’s the same poisonous Thatcherite pus that comes oozing out of all of them’.17 Since the 1990s all three Westminster parties in the UK have been captured by neo-liberal ideologists, as their shared adherence to an austerity politics indicates. This punishes the already disadvantaged for the crisis of the financial system while resolutely refusing to take effective action to halt either the continuing redistribution of wealth towards the super-rich and corporate elites, or the headlong rush to global warming exacerbated by an addiction to carbon fuels and the profits they bring. The only social democratic parties left are the nationalists, Greens and socialist parties.

So there are two possible ways to measure social democratic commitment when using voting figures. First, we could focus solely on those parties explicitly endorsing a social democratic perspective (or opposition to neo-liberal policies). Or second, we could look at the votes for the centrist Labour or traditional social democratic parties on the grounds that, although these have now embraced aspects of neo-liberalism to

8 varying degrees, there is a lag in perception by electorates, a proportion of whom may still erroneously view them as possessing social democratic values.

Table 7: Party vote share: 2010/12 parliamentary elections (%)

Green/ethno- Labour/Parti total nationalist/Socialist Socialiste Scotland 21.0 42.0 63.0 Brittany 16.1 39.9 56.0 Wales 11.8 36.3 48.1 Ireland 13.9 19.4 33.3 England 1.3 28.1 29.4 Cornwall 3.2 8.6 11.8

Whichever measure is chosen, voters in Cornwall can hardly be said to embrace social democratic values. Indeed, alone among the Celtic countries, if we add these two sums together Cornwall seems even less social democratic than England. However, there is another potential measure that implies attachment to such values. An employment structure skewed towards the public sector and the more socially responsible ‘caring’ professions might suggest a greater likelihood that people prefer, or at least tolerate, a greater role for the state. On this measure, within the UK in 2011 all the Celtic territories were more ‘statist’ than England. Although at the time of writing the Scottish Census has yet to declare its results, it is very unlikely that Scotland will be an exception to this trend. And in this sense Cornwall too is predisposed to a Celtic model of politics.

Table 8: Proportion of workforce employed in public administration, education and health, 2011 (%)

Scotland ?? Wales 32.5% Northern Ireland 31.6% Cornwall 29.5% England 28.2%

Pro-Europeanism Finally, the Celtic political model is said to more pro-European than the norm.18 Devolved institutions provide mechanisms for direct engagement with the EU’s Committee of the and provide a level of government that adds to the complexities of multi-level governance in these countries, providing more complex trans-European networks that can in some instances Westminster (and Paris) and offer alternatives to the top-down inter-governmentalism of the EU. On this criterion again, Cornwall’s lack of devolution places it apart from the other Celtic countries. While it is one of the few regions in the UK to continue to receive the highest level of European grant aid, this ‘Convergence’ programme was, before the abolition of regional development agencies in England, run from outside its territory. It is still effectively to a large extent beyond democratic scrutiny, managed by the quango-state and directed towards major ‘iconic’ and high status projects that rapidly become too big to fail.

9 Furthermore, Cornwall’s grant aid has failed to prevent the emergence of a distinctly -sceptic strand of politics, encouraged by sympathetic, or at least uncritical, media coverage of the Independence Party, particularly from the -based . If the level of Ukip voting in 2010 is taken as a measure of Euro-scepticism then Cornwall is definitely less pro-European even then England and stands in stark contrast to Scotland and Wales. Ukip took an average 23.8% of the vote in wards it contested in the 2013 local elections in Cornwall, only 5% less than the Tory mean vote at the same elections and 6.4% lower than the Lib Dems. This vote was however not translated into seats due to the idiosyncratic first past the post voting system. Indeed, in terms of seats Cornwall looks less anti-European than eastern England though more prone to be euro-sceptic than the north of England. Nonetheless, the Cornish electorate is much more likely to support Ukip than are voters in Scotland and Wales.

Table 9: United Kingdom Independence Party vote share (%)

2010 general election 2009 European elections Scotland 1.4 5.2 Wales 2.4 12.8 England 3.7 17.6 Cornwall 4.9 23.6

10 Conclusion In the majority of the measures adopted here therefore, Cornwall hardly fits a model of Celtic politics, even though that model itself overlooks some significant diversity among the other Celtic countries.19 The lack of a devolved institution marks it out from all five other Celtic countries. Its politics at a local level are not more noticeably female-friendly than in England. Although at the local level a moderate multi-party system has evolved, as in the other Celtic countries (and indeed more widely across Europe), at Westminster elections Cornwall stubbornly maintains a two-party system, one rapidly becoming an exotic oddity in the democratic world outside the USA.

It is the existence of an ethno-national identity that brings Cornwall closest to the Celtic model of politics. While MK has yet to make its electoral breakthrough at the parliamentary level, its persistence and continuity over more than half a century and its representation at local government level maintains Cornwall’s political difference from -standard English counties. This rests on an ethnic identity that evidence might suggest is mounting in intensity. However, this has to some extent been the result of mass in-migration impacting on recent generations. This social change has in turn produced a more polarised identity politics than in most of the other Celtic countries (with the obvious exception of Northern Ireland).

Finally, Cornwall’s political culture - on the measures discussed here - scarcely qualifies it for membership of a Celtic political club. Environmentalist attitudes seem shallow and only a little more prevalent than in England. Equally, Cornish voters are less social democratically inclined than in those in the rest of the Celtic territories. While the strength of the Ukip vote and of anti-Europeanism makes it resemble a southern English county more than its Celtic neighbours.

Yet, while Cornwall only has a tenuous fit with the model of Celtic politics, there is no reason that this has to remain the case. Many of the factors enumerated here - such as a gendered bias in its politics, the lack of a social democratic tradition, the level of Euroscepticism - are the results of long-standing structural and historical factors. These could well change if the growing ethno-national identity continues to gain in confidence and take political shape. What is required now is more survey research on this changing identity and on political values in Cornwall. Until we know more about such questions as which sections of the population possess the most positive attitudes to devolution or whether long-term residents or more recent arrivals are more likely to vote Ukip, Cornish politics will continue to inhabit the margins of a Celtic politics model.

11 1 David Harvey, Rhys Jones, Neil McInroy and Christine Milligan (eds), Celtic Geographies: Old culture, new times, Routledge, , 2001; Michael Newton (ed), The Celts in the , Breton University Press, 2013. 2 This is normally viewed as including Cornwall and the but excluding . 3 For example Peter Berresford Ellis, The Celtic Revolution: A study in anti-imperialism, Y Lolfa, Talybont, 1985. 4 Kurt W.Jefferson, Celtic Politics: Politics in Scotland, Ireland and Wales, University Press of America, Lanham MD, 2011. 5 Ibid., pp.8-10. 6 Ibid., p.128. 7 John Humphries, Freedom Fighters: Wales’ forgotten war 1963-93, University of Wales Press, , 2008. 8 Lieven de Winter, Margarita Gómez-Reino and Peter Lynch (eds), Autonomist Parties in Europe: Identity politics and the revival of the territorial cleavage, Institut de Ciències Polítiques i Socials, Barcelona, 2006. 9 MK’s mean local election vote of 24.5% was higher than Plaid’s mean vote a year earlier in all the local authorities in Gwent plus Bridgend, Cardiff, Merthyr, and the in Glamorgan. Even outside the urban south east, it surpassed Plaid’s performance in Powys and Flintshire. 10 Simon Henig and Lewis Baston, The Political Map of Britain, Politico’s Publishing, London, 2002, p.50. 11 Santiago Pérez-Nievas, ‘The Partido Nacionalista Vasco: Redefining political goals at the rtuen of the century’, in Lieven de Winter, Margarita Gómez-Reino and Peter Lynch (eds), Autonomist Parties in Europe: Identity politics and the revival of the territorial cleavage, Institut de Ciències Polítiques i Socials, Barcelona, 2006, 31-64. 12 This is also the situation in . 13 Bernard Deacon, The land’s end: The great sale of Cornwall, CoSERG, , 2013, p.136. 14 Kerryn Husk, ‘Ethnic group affiliation and social exclusion in Cornwall; analysis, adjustment and extension of the 2001 England and Wales Census data’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Plymouth, 2012. 15 Philipa Aldous, ‘Young people and migration choices in Cornwall’, unpublished MPhil thesis, University of Plymouth, 2002. 16 For studies of the relationship between ethno-nationalism and environmentalism see Sydney Van Atta, ‘Regional nationalist parties and ‘new politics’: the Bloque Nacionalista Galego and Plaid Cymru’, Regional and Federal Studies 13, 2003, pp.30-56 and Carwyn Fowler and Rhys Jones, ‘Can environmentalism and nationalism be reconciled? The Plaid Cymru/GreenParty alliance 1991- 95’, Regional and Federal Studies 16, 2006, pp.315-31. 17 Maev Kennedy and Stuart Kelly, ‘Iain Banks: squeeze a Tory, Blairite or Lib Dem and Thatcherite pus oozes out’, , 14 June 2013. 18 Emanuele Massetti, ‘Explaining regionalist party positioning in a multi-dimensional; ideological space: a framework for analysis’, Regional and Federal Studies 19, 2009, pp.501-31 summarises the literature on ethno-nationalist party attitudes to Europe and concludes there have been three phases of positioning. Less enthusiastic attitudes to European integration have become more typical of the most recent phase. 19 Space precludes discussion here of the Isle of Man, but the existence of a devolved institution is not accompanied by a multiparty system or proportional representation and the island, like Cornwall, does not appear to harbour the expected social democratic or post-materialist values.